Cognitive warmup. Microsoft Corp. is in regulatory crosshairs again. This time in the UK, as the country’s Competition and Markets Authority is investigating whether the tech giant made moves to limit competition with productivity software including Word and Excel, the virtual meetings platform Teams, the Copilot AI app, and even Windows itself.
The investigation begins in May. Not the first time. The CMA previously investigated Microsoft in 2023 for its OpenAI partnership, and then in 2024 for hirings from Inflection AI. Both probes, now closed.
ChatGPT drives into CarPlay
If there’s an app that I wouldn’t be using while driving (I don’t use any to be fair, apart from setting up Apple Music or YouTube Music before driving off), it is one that has anything to do with AI. Nevertheless, that’s just me. For the rest of you, OpenAI Inc. confirms that the latest ChatGPT app now brings the chatbot’s voice mode into Apple CarPlay, on cars that support this interface with iPhones running iOS 26.4.
The idea is simple—a conversation with AI about what’s on your mind, while driving. A fairly logical step for ChatGPT as it wants to cling to relevance. But one hopes you’d not drive distracted.
Google’s Gemma 4 open AI vision
First things first, you may be wondering what’s the difference between Gemini and Gemma models. Gemma is an AI processing engine, and not a chatbot-esque implementation. While the underlying technology is largely similar, Gemma is an open model that can be downloaded and run locally for free. With that out of the way, we have to assess Google’s new Gemma 4 models in terms of a key licensing change, and broader utility focus.
There’s the Effective 2B (E2B), Effective 4B (E4B), 26B Mixture of Experts (MoE), and 31B Dense. The 26B and 31B models are geared for frontier intelligence, with offline compute on personal systems. The smaller parameter size E2B and E4B models are more geared for smartphones, mobile devices, and Internet of Things ecosystems, as well as edge devices, including the Raspberry Pi, and Nvidia’s Jetson.
These models are released under the Apache 2.0 licence, which means offering significant freedom for developers, researchers, and commercial entities to use, modify, finetune, and redistribute the models with minimal restrictions. Previously, that flexibility was comparatively limited.
Penguin Random House is suing OpenAI
A bit more legal headache for OpenAI. Publishers Penguin Random House is suing the AI company, for what they say is a copyright violation by ChatGPT mimicking and reproducing the content of a popular series of German children’s books.
The lawsuit, filed in a Munich court, states Penguin Random House’s legal team gave ChatGPT a prompt, “Can you write a children’s book in which Coconut the Dragon is on Mars”, to which it generated text and images that are “virtually indistinguishable from the original”.
Coconut the Little Dragon (Der kleine Drache Kokosnuss) is one of the most popular German books for children, by illustrator Ingo Siegner—and the canvas spans more than 30 volumes, two feature films and a TV series. The publisher’s contention is OpenAI’s large language models have unlawfully “memorised” Siegner’s work.
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